The countdown begins.

In exactly 24 hours I will be boarding the plane to Bosnia!

Okay, technically I'll be boarding a plane headed for Washington, D.C., and then from there another one to Vienna, and then another to Sarajevo. But still, it's an exciting thought.

I am sitting in my grandparents' house in Michigan surrounded by piles of laundry and miscellaneous other things from camp. I hate packing. Seriously, I have a deep personal abhorrence for picking clothes ahead of time, folding them neatly, and arranging them in a big suitcase. Camp was way more my style: I'd get dressed in the dark and didn't look in a mirror for days on end. And at the end of each day, I'd shower and be clean for a few hours, just long enough to fall asleep, and then wake up the next morning and get to run around again. It was wonderful.

Speaking of camp being wonderful... it really was. The first few days of orientation were hard; I was on the verge of tears more than once, feeling really out-of-the-loop and overwhelmed and lonely. But God is faithful. Always. Eventually I began to understand what it meant to really be at camp for the kids instead of for myself, something I thought I had grasped before but needed to relearn. I began to feel closer to the other counselors, which was great... and then the kids arrived, and everything got even better! I loved my girls! My co-counselor and I had eleven 10-year-olds in our cabin, which is like having eleven adoring younger sisters. (Sorry Kendra.) I learned a lot from them, and was amazed by the depth of questions they would ask and their willingness to be vulnerable. One day a question showed up in our anonymous question jar about why God would create people who he knew wouldn't follow him. Hmm. Yeah. It's tricky to talk predestination and original sin with a 10-year-old.

There were so many beautifully sweet moments that I can't even hope to share them all. I'll end this post with a prayer request: that in Bosnia, I wouldn't forget camp. And that when I eventually go back to camp, I wouldn't forget Bosnia. And when I say camp and Bosnia, I simply mean places where God is working--in very different ways, but definitely and evidently working.

For more information, here are links to camp and the program in Bosnia. Woohoo!

Welcome.

Well hello there!

I've decided to finally be brave and actually let people know I have a blog now. (Which probably means I should stop using it as the strangest pseudo-journal ever seen... for the sake of the, like, two people who will come read this. Hi Kendra and Grandma.) If you scroll way down to the very first post in December of 2009, you'll understand why I started this blog in the first place: it was supposed to serve as a record of my time traveling in 2010. But then I never did anything with it in Vietnam (plus, blogger might have been blocked by the Communist government... they're stricter than Bess [sorry, bad Calvin joke]). Anyway. I'll try to be better about it this time around.

So anyway, to the three of you who might read this: welcome. Thanks for putting up with my ramblings. And please leave comments, or send me emails, or something. It'll make me feel less narcissistic and pathetic for spending so much time writing about myself.

Now, for the rundown of what I'm actually doing this summer:

June 1-June 22: Summer's Best Two Weeks
(I get to be a camp counselor!)
June 23-July 13: Bosnia with GYC
(I'll explain later... but be very, very excited)
July 14-August 17: Summer's Best Two Weeks
(I'm baaaack...)

...and then a mad dash home, packing for Romania, and scooting off for the fall semester. Chaos, I know. But that's why I'm trusting that this series of miraculously-open doors is, indeed, something that God has designed. I can hardly wait to embark.

Christianity and immigration.

At the end of the school year, a group of students in my dorm organized a rally in protest of the immigration bill in Arizona, calling for comprehensive reform of a system that is broken, discriminatory, and unjust. Below is the rough draft of an article we are submitting to the Banner, a publication of the Christian Reformed Church.

CHRISTIAN ACTIVISM

"God defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the alien, giving him food and clothing. And you are to love those who are aliens, for you yourselves were aliens in Egypt." (Deuteronomy 10:18-19)

Christians must be concerned about immigration.

Recently-passed immigration legislation in Arizona, and the proposal of similar bills in other states, should have Christians around the United States concerned. Many critics fear the bill will increase racial profiling and discrimination but fail to address the deepest failures of America's broken immigration system. In May, in recognition of the embedded problems in all of America's immigration law (not just Arizona), a group of students from Calvin College organized a rally to call attention to the embedded structural inequalities, human rights abuses, and destruction of families and communities that current immigration law perpetuates.

The Church seems to shy away from politics. But as authors like Rodney Clapp and Stanley Hauerwas remind us, the Church is political. It involves a specific vision of the way things ought to be--"shalom"--and communicates normative beliefs about life in this world. The Christian faith has never been about other-worldliness or pie-in-the-sky spirituality. Jesus' very incarnation bears witness to the importance of this world in the Kingdom of God.

But too often, involvement in this world has tarnished the church, dragging us into rabid party loyalties, political mudslinging, and idolatrous commitment to single-issue platforms. Instead of embodying a Christ-centered counterculture, the American church has often morphed into a subculture: a modified version of the culture at large. We have occasionally forgotten that our primary allegiance is not to the kingdoms of this world, but to the kingdom of heaven (John 18:36).

Certainly, Christians should engage in politics, but a different sort of politics. There are questions that must be asked about legality, economics, and border control. But those debates are secondary to our calling as Christians: to love God and to love our neighbor (even those who have entered this country illegally). If our laws prohibit us from offering them love and mercy, we must do whatever we can to change our laws, and give love and mercy anyway.

We must realize this: we worship a God who is love; thus, the Church must love the aliens among us--after all, we are also aliens here. We worship a God who is justice, and who commands us to act justly and love mercy (Micah 6:8). We worship a God who created all people in his image, and cares for the lives of each of them (Psalm 130:13).

After the rally, an older Hispanic man approached me, hand outstretched and tears in his eyes. "Thank you," he said, shaking my hand firmly. "We need you."

His words hit hard. The group of us who had organized the event had never dreamed of what it would bring: Spanish radio stations throughout West Michigan heard of our rally and put it on the air, bringing Hispanic families from all over Grand Rapids onto Calvin's campus in support. That afternoon, we watched in amazement as parents and children came from all directions, bolstering the crowd and attracting the curious stares of passing students.

The hugs and handshakes of appreciative community members after the rally taught us something unexpected. Never before had we thought about our amazing opportunity and responsibility, or what our act of support and hospitality would communicate to the Hispanic population of Grand Rapids. In our advocacy, we were showing them love and grace; in our activism, we were trying to embody the truth of Christ. Even as students at a prominent Christian college, we had failed to realize that our voices and actions matter to the Church and to the world--until that afternoon.

But our voices matter a great deal. We should not be afraid to use them--with love and grace. Every time we open our mouths, let us speak only the truth of Jesus Christ and his gospel--a message that promises hope and an end to injustice (Job 5:16).


Special thanks to Daniel, Jessica, Nicole, Laura, Elena, Jack, and Luke (and any others who I've forgotten).

Home.

I forgot how hard it is to go home.

I'm sitting up late at the dining room table at my parents' house in Iowa. Weird, I've never referred to it as my parents' house before. Maybe it's because my room is gone. Well, technically it's still there, with its green-painted walls and overloaded bookshelves--but the room is filled with the stuff of our foreign exchange student (which is awesome; I am entirely glad she is filling the space with life). But it's weird, you know? It's weird to return home after two years away, two years in which I've changed more deeply than I can express, and to settle back into the space that once formed and comforted me. It's slightly unnerving--like trying on winter sweaters when October rolls around, and the long sleeves and cozy wool feel unfamiliar, foreign, confining. There's something just--well, weird--about returning home.

Yet there's something utterly charming about it too. I still squeal with delight when I cross the Mississippi River and drive into the soaring tree-covered limestone bluffs of Iowa. There is something wonderful about parking in front of my family's red brick house and getting out of my car to be bowled over by the frantic yelps and excited licking of my dog. There's something reassuring in dinnertime conversations that flow naturally for an hour or more, with my brother and sister and I resorting right back to the teasing, joking chaos we grew up creating. Something about Iowa will always be home for me.

But the reality is also that this place is no longer really home. Home is also vanReken Hall, and City Hope Church, and the political science department offices in DeVos, and Supper House at St. Alphonsus, and the #6 Rapid. Home is Jack, and Alyssa, and Grassroots, and the KHvR Barnabai. Home is people and places and memories. I read a great quote on facebook (yeah, yeah) and it's been toying at me this evening. It's a quote from an author and anthropologist named Miriam Adeney. It speaks for itself.

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart always will be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.”

Pictures from Vietnam.

Rice paddies, everywhere.



Memorial of the My Lai massacre.



New friends in the park.



Resting in Hoi An.



Boats on the beach near Danang.



This is how I remember Vietnam.

Vietnam.

I never wrote much about my time in Vietnam in January. I never had time, I guess. Or I was too busy shoving other things into my brain to allow myself time to write about it, beyond my journal and the final paper for the class. I don't know if, even now, I want to write about it fully. But I do want to post a few pictures... alone they tell some of the story. Enjoy.

Lenten musings.

Vietnam taught me this. I spent January wondering about God, to be honest. I wondered how he could have been present in a place where children were slaughtered and pregnant women poisoned by Agent Orange. I wondered what he would have to say to us Americans, who left museums full of our guilt and got onto our sleek tourist bus and drove easily away. And I wondered why this Buddhist country had grasped forgiveness in a way Christians often fail to do. But this quote hit me, strangely, long after my return. I still believe in God.

"I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the one Nietzsche ridiculed as 'God on the Cross.' In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who is immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered the world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us." John Stott